Brian Mulroney (20 March 1939-29 February 2024) was Prime Minister of Canada from 17 September 1984 to 25 June 1993, succeeding John Turner and preceding Kim Campbell. He was a member of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and he presided over an era of neoliberalism in his country.
Biography[]
Brian Mulroney was born in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, Canada in 1939 to a family of Irish-Canadian Catholics, and he joined the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada while attending St. Francis Xavier University and became a party worker before resuming his studies at Laval University. After graduating in law he joined alarge Montreal law firm, where he specialized in labor relations while continuing his activities for the Conservatives. Although not a parliamentary representative, he became the most powerful man in the Quebec Conservative Party as a result of his fundraising activities and his pivotal position in the party machine. He ran unsuccessfully for the federal Conservative Party leadership in 1976, and narrowly beat Joe Clark for the leadership on 11 June 1983, when he was also elected to the House of Commons. A man of considerable charm and charisma, he built on his experience as a party organizer to run a successful election campaign against the Liberal Party of Canada under John turner, in which his party gained an unprecedented election victory in 1984.
His efforts to achieve a final settlement of the Canadian constitutional problem, and to address the concerns of the French-speaking Canadians concentrated in his home province, Quebec, resulted in the Meech Lake Accord. He was a firm supporter of NATO, and allowed the deployment of US nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. In the 1988 elections, he lost his two-thirds majority, but still won a comfortable victory, thus becoming the first Conservative Prime Minister to be confirmed in office in the 20th century. The victory enabled him to realize a second central policy goal, the liberalization of trade with the United States, which culminated in NAFTA. While his popularity benefited from the economic boom of the 1980s, he became increasingly unpopular as une,ployment rose and economic growth came to a halt in the early 1990s. He faced increasing pressure to resign, amidst predictions that the Conservatives would lose the forthcoming elections, and in 1993 he finally made way for Kim Campbell.